'I once put our entire grant on a horse'

They take characters from real life - a comedian who strips backwards or a redundant miner - and shoot them alongside professional actors, such as Paul Gascoigne's sister Anna. And the results are extraordinary. Simon Hattenstone meets Newcastle's low budget movie-makers, the Amber collective

'I once put our entire grant on a horse'

They take characters from real life - a comedian who strips backwards or a redundant miner - and shoot them alongside professional actors, such as Paul Gascoigne's sister Anna. And the results are extraordinary. Simon Hattenstone meets Newcastle's low budget movie-makers, the Amber collective

Thursday 7 June 2001 20.13 EDT
First published on Thursday 7 June 2001 20.13 EDT

Ned Kelly pulls out one of his ready-rolled roll-ups, sips on his beer and tells me he's had a bit of a life. Long-distance lorry driver, musician, rag and bone man, nude stand-up comic. Now, at 60, the little man drowning in the huge leather jacket is starring in his first movie. "Apart from my little grandson Dylan, it's the best thing that's ever happened in my life," he says. Kelly plays a bitter, abusive pigeon fancier in Like Father - a man who feels let down by his son and the world in general - and having lost his job down the pits years ago, the council is now driving him off the allotment where he trains his pigeons. "It wasn't too hard to get into the part because I'm a naturally miserable bastard anyhow, like," he says with a dirty great smile. "D'you want a roll-up, bonny boy?"

I ask why it's the best thing that's happened to him. "Well, can you imagine seeing yourself on a big screen, agents ringing you up, people that you don't like? 'Where are you working tonight?' 'At a cinema near you, you bastard.' "

Like Father, the latest film by the Amber Film collective, is about three generations of working-class fathers and sons who can't talk to each other. Alongside Ken Loach, Amber are the last great (working) class warriors of British film. They make movies in the north-east about a way of life that is rapidly disappearing, and one that is rarely represented on screen: sea coalers, fishermen, harness racers are just a few of the subjects they have tackled over the past 30 years. But there is more to their movies than history. They are funny and moving, political and challenging, and as real as it gets.

Ned Kelly had never acted before. But Amber knew about his work as a stand-up comic. After decades gigging around the north-east he has spent the past 11 years playing a summer season in Benidorm, telling gags about his wife while doing his reverse strip. It all started one day when he arrived late for a show. "I was standing there bollocky naked, and I was announced. I didn't have time to get dressed and I thought, well, I'll just go for it. So I went on bollocky naked." He gradually dressed as he worked his way through his act. "In those days it wasn't tolerated. The place went up, and they weren't going to pay me. The Sunday Sport got hold of it, and it was plastered all over the place." Kelly says no comics used to strip back then, but nowadays they're all at it.

Kelly is as terse and raging in Like Father as he is warm and loquacious in real life. But Amber saw the potential of his misanthropic routine. And, of course, it was a plus that his hobby is pigeon fancying.

He is still amazed at how the Amber team have created Like Father. As far as he was concerned, he was just saying a few lines in the presence of a camera, and three years later he is invited to see a perfectly formed movie. "It makes me marvel how you can get a blank piece of paper, create characters and then the next thing you know is it's on at the cinema. So really all the credit should go to the writers."

The writers would disagree, though. Ned Kelly and particularly Joe Armstrong, who plays his son, are largely responsible for their own characters. Armstrong had also never acted before. A former miner, club singer, trumpeter, voluntary worker and special-needs teacher, in the film he plays Joe Elliot, a former miner, club singer, trumpeter, voluntary worker and special-needs teacher. You watch an Amber film and you're convinced you are eavesdropping on real lives.

And that is because you are. Like Loach, Amber use non-professional actors alongside professionals. Whereas the script comes first in Loach's films, the real people come first in Amber projects. They can spend years searching for their characters, and when they find them they will then film them in the context of their everyday lives. So when we see Joe teach ing in Like Father, he's doing it for real. Eventually, Amber write a story to wrap around the life. In the meantime, the "characters" have to learn how to act - or even better, behave as if the camera's not there. Little wonder that an Amber film is typically five years in the making.

We are at Amber headquarters on Newcastle quayside. This wonderful jigsaw of buildings winds up a steep alley. What used to be a boatbuilder's, joiner's and plumber's is now Amber's studio, debating chamber, photographic gallery, 53-seat cinema and cafe. A couple of the stars from Like Father - Armstrong and Anna Gascoigne, brother of footballer Paul - won't be here till later in the day when they have finished their day jobs.

In a darkened room a woman from Channel 4 is listening to their proposed new projects. She is easy to spot - she looks as if she's dressed down for the day but, with her decorative waist rhododendron and designer gypsy scarf, she's still far smarter than the Amber crowd.

They show her some video footage of Ray Stubbs and his Amazing One Man Band and explain they want to make a film about Newcastle's busking clubs. Stubbs has been in many Amber films, and cinematographer Peter Roberts explains he is something of a celebrity. "He had a number three hit in Ireland about 15 years ago - he's got an international following." We see other bands coming and going. The odd singer is joined by the even odder audience member, groups start jamming with each other, the bar gets dizzy with drink. There is drama in the footage, but this is the drama of real life. If Amber are to develop this into a movie they will have to weave a fictional narrative around the club.

Murray Martin, who helped found the collective in 1969, points out two photographs on the wall. One is of a slumped horse seemingly ready for the knackers' yard. The other, below, is of a champion racer. "You know, they're the same horse. Half A Crown was the first horse we bought. He was dying and the owner said you can have him for half a crown. Well, somehow, I had half a crown in my pocket, and he gave it me. We'd been told that if we gave sick horses brown sauce it would revive them, so we poured a bottle down his mouth and he never looked back. Within a year he was racing."

The horse featured in Eden Valley, Amber's film about harness racing. Somehow the story of the horse is also the story of the Amber collective - survival against all odds thanks to a fierce mix of good fortune, initiative and belief.

Back in 1968 the founding members of Amber were film students at London's Regent Street Polytechnic. They were perfectly positioned to capture the Grosvenor Square riots, but their film was considered to be an incitement to violence and banned from the student unions where they wanted to show it. As students they also made a little polemical film inspired by two slogans - "All You Need is Dynamite" and "Children Go Home and Chastise Your Parents". A year later they set up as a collective, paid themselves a fiver a week and prepared for the revolution. Before long they decided the most revolutionary thing they could do was faithfully record working-class life.

"It hadn't really been done before in our view," Martin says. "If you look at the period of the 1930s in which Grierson and his mob filmed, there are no images of unemployment - the greatest period of unemployment, and there's not one picture. The reason was that they were banned. They weren't even allowed to film the Jarrow march because the Crown Film Unit was a government organisation."

Amber's first film was a 10-minute documentary shot in 1969 on the North Shields Ferry across the Tyne. They immediately ran into trouble with broadcasters, who demanded its "unintelligi ble" theme song be removed. Amber refused, and the film was never shown on the BBC. The collective spent the 1970s making documentaries supported financially by the regional funding body Northern Arts: Mai, the story of an Irish-Indian anarchist; Last Shift, about a traditional brick-making factory on the brink of closure; Quayside, a tour around the Newcastle dock area that was Amber's home, which was also set for demolition.

Martin says: "Someone said to me, the trouble is you only make films about things that are closing down. At the time we were making a film in East Germany, so I said to him, well, the next one won't be about something closing down. Six months later, the wall came down."

Channel 4 helped them make their first feature-length film, Seacoal, in 1985, a semi-fictional narrative set among the coal-collectors on Lynemouth beach. When Seacoal went on to win Europe's equivalent of best film Oscar, few newspapers bothered to report it. Subsequent films included T Dan Smith, an account of Newcastle's infamous "city boss" through the 60s, and most recently The Scar, about the emotional legacy of the 1984 miners' strike. Like Father is by far their biggest-budget movie - £600,000 including distribution costs.

Before relocating to Newcastle in the late 60s, Martin briefly lectured in the history of aesthetics. He and Roberts say their parents made it clear that they had been given decent educations with the expectation that they would transcend their backgrounds. "My dad was a fireman who always voted Labour. But he assumed that as soon as I'd been through university I'd become a Tory," Martin says. In fact it worked the other way, "We wanted to reconnect, living and working in those communities and putting something back in."

So many films that purport to be about working-class life patronise their characters, he says. Take Billy Elliot, Stephen Daldry's Oscar-nominated film about the ballet boy growing up in the north-east. "When you examine the message, what it says is that if you want to be successful get out of the north-east; there's nothing there for you," says Ellin Hare, who has directed Amber's last two films and has been with the collective for 20 years. Not that you would have known she'd directed them - individuals are not credited on the movies.

Are all the decisions really taken collectively? "Well, the crude rule we've always had is that the person who paints the wall chooses the colour," Martin says. "So we have a debate about the colour of the wall, but ultimately, if I'm painting it, I make the choice. The idea of making films by committee is nonsense. We never believed that. I think for every film there will be two or three of us who have a major role, who appropriate it."

"I wouldn't use the word 'appropriate'," Roberts says. Thirty years on, Amber still fiercely debate every point they make.

At one point there were 18 members of the collective and it became unworkable. Today there are seven. Murray Martin, who does enough talking for all the group, says that as soon as you get more than eight members a collective is unworkable.

They still operate as a true collective. These days their take-home pay is £1,100 a month. "We decided everyone would be paid the same, irrespective of whether they had children." Twenty years ago they almost fell apart over money. "We'd always had this policy that outside earnings were collective earnings and some people couldn't work with that. It sounds quite Stalinist now, in retrospect," Roberts says.

"There always were grey areas, though," Martin says. He admits there were times that he won on a horse and didn't put the winnings back into Amber. The others give him a look. Big winnings? "Yes, I've done some good doubles. Yes, I've been a gambler," he says . While the others laugh at his confession, he continues undaunted. "Several thousand pounds, I suppose." He tells me about another collective he was involved with, Live Theatre. "I once put their entire grant on a horse because there was no choice. We only got three grand, and three wasn't going to sort us out, so we either put it on a horse or went down." And? "We won about 15 grand."

Anna Gascoigne, who has been a regular in Amber films, joins us. She looks like Gazza, but prettier. Martin discovered Gascoigne when she was acting with Live Theatre 12 or so years ago.

"You were 18 at the time," Martin says. "No, I was older. I was 20," Gascoigne laughs. She laughs a lot. She is one of the few professional actors Amber uses, but she finds it hard to get regular work. It's a shame because she's a wonderful natural actress - oblivious to the camera and beautifully understated in every gesture.

What does she do when she's not with Amber? "I don't want to tell you what I'm doing at the moment, it's embarrassing. I'm working for a temping agency. It's like being back at school. I've already been told off three times for talking. I've been called a troublemaker." She says she is paid just £3.70 an hour, but she has to take the work because she's a single parent with two kids. "It's not like I'm desperate because Paul helps out a lot, but I don't like asking him for money. That's why I work."

Martin can't understand why more directors don't cast Gascoigne. "I think she represents a real authentic working-class voice, and that's rarer than people think." He has a quick rethink. "Actually, I think that's why people don't use her that much." He says that the working-class characters we see in soap operas tend to be caricatured or sanitised. With Amber, you hear it how it is spoken.

I ask Gascoigne whether she shares Amber's politics. She looks at Martin. "We never discuss politics, do we? Have we?"

"No," Martin says. "Having said that, the question is still valid. What are your politics?" They seem to be holding their collective breath. Gascoigne giggles. "Oh my God! Someone else start." Martin says that they had defined themselves, loosely, as socialist. She looks relieved. "Yeh. Yeh . I'm a socialist."

Martin says one of Gascoigne's greatest skills is her ability to blend with the non-actors - the ultimate test of an actor's believability. "I'm glad you're not that famous. You can't use famous people because people respond totally differently. You mentioned Paul. If you went in a pub with him people would not be natural because it's Paul Gascoigne and that creates a barrier." He also talks about Robson Greene, who made his film debut with Amber, and says there is no way they could use him these days because he's too well known.

So if Anna becomes famous he'd drop her just like that? "Absolutely, absolutely," Martin says.

"He would and all," Gascoigne says.

She says she loves working with Amber because as an actor she has more say in the creative process. "You get to do improvisation, develop your character, whereas with most films and television I've done you just get handed a script." Gascoigne talks about the way that reality and fiction can blur, and mentions Dream On, a film in which Amber Styles (a local pool player spotted by the collective who changed her name to Amber) plays a woman in an abusive relationship. At the time, Styles herself was in an abusive relationship. "She would argue with Hoggy, who played her husband, tell him that he wasn't being violent enough, that he wasn't hitting her hard enough. In the end Hoggy had to tell her, 'Look Amber, this isn't real life.' "

B ut it's not surprising if actors get confused. Take pub life, for instance. Most of the pub scenes in Amber movies - and there are many of them - were shot in a pub that the collective owned and ran. "The reason we went for the pub was to give us control," Martin says. "It made sense to be able to say, we want a quiet pub in which you could actually set up light in and not interfere with. In filming you have a tendency to either destroy what's there or take it home and reconstruct it, and we didn't want that."

Likewise, when they came to make a film about sea fishing they bought their own boat. Not only did it make economic sense - buying it was far cheaper than renting for two years - it also gave the film added depth. The actors lived and fished on the boat, while Amber brilliantly caught the everchanging moods of sea and sky. You sense that at times they must have waited weeks, possibly months, for the perfect sunset. In Fading Light is one of the few great boat films because the boat is a character rather than a stationary prop.

The day is drawing to a close, and we head back to the pub. Joe Armstrong, the lead actor in Like Father, joins us. His way of speaking, his gestures, the details of his life all tally with Joe Elliot in the film. The only difference is that he can now add film actor to the already brimming CV. Armstrong left school at 16 with two O levels. When the pits closed he received a payoff. What did he do with it? "Actually, it was just like in the film - we blew it going to Florida, paying the rent off, new car, kitchen. Then I was just trying to make ends meet musically." I ask him whether, like Joe Elliot, he also screwed up his family life with his workaholism. "No, not this time, it hasn't. Because I've prioritised this time."

It's spooky talking to Armstrong. I feel I know him so well and, of course, in a sense I do. There are little differences emerging though. Armstrong tells me that he's going to have to knock the day and evening jobs on the head for a few weeks - he's been invited to judge on one of the panels at the Sydney Film Festival.

Amber effectively set out their stall with this 10-minute real-time document of the Northumbria Ferry crossing between North Shields and South Shields. Twenty more documentaries would follow in the next 16 years, with the longest (Tyne Lives) running an hour and the shortest (Jellyfish) a svelte seven-and-a-half minutes.

Seacoal (1985)

Amber's first feature emerged out of two years spent studying the soot-blackened locals of Lynemouth, who scrape a living plucking waste coal from the nearby beaches. With this largely improvised folk-art portrait, the collective turned a spotlight on an impoverished sub-stratum of Thatcher's Britain. Critics hailed Seacoal as "gritty Loach-style realism, leavened by lyrical camerawork and a strong romantic sense of community".

Dream On (1991)

Structured around a trio of darts matches and crackling with magic-realist flourishes, Dream On at first glance looks an uncharacteristically flamboyant affair; a dreamy feminist fable about a Donegal woman's Pollyanna-ish impact on the women of North Shields. "It isn't a move away from realism, however," cautioned the Northern Echo. "Dreams are part of people's lives and the film is attempting to open up that richness of experience."

Eden Valley (1994)

Amber crept within shouting distance of the mainstream with this adept generation-gap saga played out against a horse-racing backdrop. Brian Hogg stars as the horny-handed horse breeder who bonds with his estranged scallywag son (Darren Bell) during the leisurely training of a champion harness-racer.

The Scar (1997)

Amber's last film before Like Father was a pungent, potently acted account of a Northumberland family still struggling to cope with the fall-out from the 1984 miners' strike. Fittingly this tale of changing times and the gulf between old and New Labour found itself championed by Tony Benn as "a drama of enormous importance".